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Assistant Professor
Department of Comparative Literature and the College

Leah Feldman’s teaching and research explore the poetics and politics of global literary networks, focusing on critical approaches to translation theory, semiotics, postcolonial theory, and Marxist aesthetics. Her current research traces connections between the Russian and Soviet empires and the Turko-Persianate world. Her current book project, “On the Threshold of Eurasia: Orientalism and Revolutionary Aesthetics in the Caucasus, 1905–1929,” exposes the ways in which the idea of revolution informed the interplay between orientalist and anti-colonial discourses in Russian and Azeri poetry, prose, and visual media. Tracing translations and intertextual engagements across Russia, the Caucasus, and Western Europe, it offers an alternative vision of empire, modernity, and anti-imperialism from the vantage point of cosmopolitan centers in the Russian empire and Soviet Union.

She is the author of “Orientalism on the Threshold: Reorienting Heroism in Late Imperial Russia,” in Boundary 2 and a forthcoming collection of translations of Azeri plays.

Feldman received her PhD in comparative literature from the University of California, Los Angeles, after which she held fellowships in residence at the Princeton Institute of International and Regional Studies and the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University in Budapest.